@JonCarpenter - Except when, by being an untethered screen, you can just turn it on its side and have an 800x1280 screen with very little effort. While you have to manually make this rotation with current Tablet PCs, I imagine there's a very good chance that most of these upcoming devices will have accelerometer chips in them to sense your orientation and automatically adjust- or at least the ones that become successful.

@doingitwrong - I would gladly adopt buying digitally distributed comics at, say, 2/3rds the price of the physical one if they were good resolution and not in a gimpy proprietary format. It's too bad that just distributing things in common formats with decent definition is apparently anathema to a lot of media companies. When I say "good resolution," I mean something at around 1.5 megapixels or so; any decent image viewer will just fit it to the display without mangling it.

@ JonCarpenter - I've tried reading comics in Windows XP on my Asus 1000HE with a display resolution of 1024x600 and it was awful. My N810 with a resolution of 800x480 does pretty well as a compact reading device as long as nothing very fancy is attempted, but that's mostly because of the good image viewer that comes as part of the software suite and the fact that it's handheld so switching the orientation is easy.

Pixel Qi is just a hi-res LCD screen, so it's inevitable. Screen size and horsepower are not going to be selling points, RAM is too cheap to be relevant, so in the tablet market screen resolution will become an important selling point. As a type designer I would kill for a 160 dpi tablet running OS X!

I might go for one of those iTablets if the price is right and I don't have to jailbreak it. I use my old Powerbook mostly for processing photos and scanning and storing old prints and etchings. I spend a lot of time at the art library in town, so being able to bring this in is a plus.

If they just sandwiched two of these together like the centrefold of a book with a hinge (kinda DS style), gave it a nice leather binding and included a stylus with wacom cintiq-like levels of sensitivity and functionality it would be the perfect device I've often spent bored moments imagining. We're getting closer :D another 4 or 5 years maybe.

The question, then, is how much a device like this will cost. If there's a 7-inch model and a 10-inch model like the article suggests, then chances are they will be something like $399 and $499, respectively. Too rich for my blood.

The big question I have is whether they'll update the MacBook Pros in January alongside the unveiling of this tablet. I'm right on the verge of buying a MBP but I have this sneaking suspicion they start off the presentation by updating the MBP's and then end with the iSlate announcement.

Last time I heard of a price was about $800-$1k. I believe this was on gizmodo or one of its kinship feeds, around oct-nov. I'm curious if it'll just end up being a large-view ipod like the larger kindle is to the normal-sized kindle, though; an ipod for those with issues with the small screen...